


Just Charley

by TheDoctorIsIcecube



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Alien Genders, Certainly not Eight and Charley, Nonbinary Charley Pollard, Nonbinary Eighth Doctor, They're Weird, Who Needs the Gender Binary Anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-02 02:11:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4041754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDoctorIsIcecube/pseuds/TheDoctorIsIcecube
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ever since she was little, Charley hasn't felt quite like she thought a girl should feel like. Eventually, her quest for adventure leads her to meet a man who's not a man who tells her things she's never even dreamed of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Charley

Charley figured out that she wasn't like her sisters when she was four, and her mother presented her with a nice dress to wear for a party. Most small girls would have squealed in delight, Charley proceeded to go and sit in a muddy puddle in the garden whilst wearing the thing. She didn't like it. It was all puffy and fluffy and weird. It was like wearing a cloud. But in a bad, heavy way that she didn't like.

She didn't like a lot of the dresses that her mother told her to wear over the years, either. By age twelve, she owned exactly three dresses that she liked, and a whole lot more pairs of trousers than her parents were comfortable with. She had to wear skirts to school. She didn't like that much. She would rather climb over the fence of the school and go to play football with the boys in the village.

And she'd lost count of the amount of times she'd begged her parents to let her cut her hair short. She'd tried it herself once, using a pair of her mother's embroidery scissors, and she hadn't gotten very far. There had been a weird short patch in the back of her hair for months.

Her mother eventually told her that when she turned sixteen she could use her own allowance for a lady's short cut. She wasn't very good at being a lady.

Eventually, she decided to stop responding when anyone called her Charlotte. It was a silly, old fashioned name. Charley was much nicer. It felt more like her name. Even though she was never given it. She gave it to herself. She still responded to the nicknames her sisters gave her, because they were only little and they didn't know better. But, when anyone addressed her as Charlotte, she would go conveniently deaf. She even ran away from home for a week during the summer when she was fourteen, and when she came back, her parents decided it was wise to listen when she said she didn't like the name Charlotte.

So she was Charley. She wasn't a normal girl and she definitely wasn't a boy. She decided then that she wanted to be an explorer. She would see everything.

She even started keeping a diary, because she liked writing and a friend from school had told her once that she should be an author. After a while, her quest for adventure led her to be aboard an airship, pretending to be a boy, something that came rather more naturally to her than she felt it would to most girls. She'd had a fair bit of practise. Sneaking around places and running away was easier when you weren't a 'delicate lady'.

Unfortunately, it was a lot harder to keep up the illusion aboard an airship high in the sky. And so, she ran into the Doctor. Quite literally.  
She'd stopped her disguise by then. But she kept the clothes. It was far more comfortable. She liked the cap, too, when it didn't itch.

She also liked the Doctor, who was by far the strangest man she'd ever met. Although, he did repeatedly insist he wasn't a man, and then by the time he'd pulled her into his bizarre impossible spaceship, he was going on about Time Lords and strange genders and neutral pronouns, whatever those were. It was all a little beyond her, to start with.

But then he (they, after a while) made an effort to lay it all out for her. They showed her the future, where no one really bothered who wore what anymore. 

The future, she decided, was a whole lot nicer than her own time. And all the Doctor's strange talk about there being more genders than male and female had been playing on her mind rather a lot ever since they'd first brought it up.

"Dooooctoooor." She asked, swinging her legs out over the void all around them. "Do most aliens have different genders?"

"Why, yes. A lot of alien cultures have more than your binary human system." They took a sip of tea, gazing down at the swirly blue and white marble that was Earth below. "Even you humans have more than two genders, really. You just don't acknowledge the others."

"Can people from my time have different genders?" Could she come up with an excuse fast enough if they asked who she was referring to?

The Doctor laughed, a light musical sound Charley had grown rather fond of in her recent weeks of adventure. 

"Of course. Humans have always had more than two genders. Why do you ask, Charley?"

"I, um, I've met a lot of odd rich people." She said hurriedly.

"Right. Are you sure you aren't asking for yourself?" They tapped her on the end of her nose, and she blinked in surprise. How had they known that?

"Um." She said. She didn't really know what her gender was.

"It's perfectly alright if you are. You know, I'm pretty sure I have a book in the TARDIS library from the year 8020 that lists every gender a human wrote on the Third Worldwide Census. It's a good 150 pages long."

"Wow." She said. "I'll just stick with nothing."

"Fair enough." The Doctor took another sip of tea and then jumped up to go and fiddle with some part of the TARDIS. "Is there anything you want me to change about how I address you? I told you about neutral pronouns, if you want those. I have another book full of pronouns, actually..." They trailed off at Charley's slightly alarmed look. Just how many pronouns could there BE that they could write a whole book full of them.

"Just Charley." She said, grinning more than she had even when she discovered the world was larger than she could dream of. "And however it was before. If I think of something else, I'll tell you."

"Of course." They walked up, pulling her into a quick hug and planting a kiss on the top of her head. "Just Charley it is then."

**Author's Note:**

> Isn't this cute :3
> 
> ~Emily


End file.
